Fred was just about the most garrulous of the Pike Hollow residents Logan had spoken with. He also seemed to know more than most. Yet on this one particularly important point he seemed reticent. Logan realized he would have to show his hand just a little. He drained his beer, ordered another, and invited Fred to have one, on him. When it came, he said: “You must be talking about that clan.”
At this, Fred nodded. “The Blakeneys,” he said, popping the cap off a bottle of Budweiser and placing it on the bar in front of him.
This was a darkly hinted nugget that, in one form or another, Logan had picked up from just about everyone he’d talked to: the town’s deep, aiding, and long-standing mistrust of the so-called Blakeney clan.
“Tell me about these Blakeneys,” Logan asked offhandedly. “Everything I’ve heard is just rumor.”
Fred hesitated again.
“I won’t say I heard it from you.”
Fred considered a moment, then shrugged. “Guess there’s nothing wrong with saying what everyone in town knows already. Those Blakeneys have lived in the area since before anyone could remember.”
“Where, exactly?”
Fred pointed southwest, over Logan’s shoulder. “They’ve got a big, rambling old stead on the edge of the Wilderness.”
“What’s it like?”
Fred shrugged. “They don’t care for outsiders, and that’s a fact. Fenced themselves in, keep to themselves, make a living off the land, rarely set foot in town. Don’t know anybody who’s been inside, but from what I hear they’ve got all sorts of ramshackle buildings and things in there.”
Logan pushed his beer bottle to one side, untouched. “Sounds strange, all right. But why would people think they had anything to do with the murders?”
“First, there ain’t many bears around these parts. You find them in the High Peaks region now and again, but they avoid humans. Second, I’ve been hearing strange stories about those Blakeneys ever since I was a kid — stories that make me think them capable of murder… and more.”
“What kind of strange stories?”
Fred took a pull from his beer. “They’ve lived deep in the woods for too long. People do that, you know, and it changes them. But from what I hear tell, that clan was always vicious. That, and… well, there was a rash of missing children around here back in the seventies — oh, it got hushed up, but everybody knows who took ’em — and why.”
Fred was voluble now, but even so Logan didn’t want to ask why aloud. He merely raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“Rituals. Dark rituals. And I don’t mean black magic — I mean something worse. The way those Blakeneys have dealings with the animals of the deep forest — well, it’s unnatural, people say. Communing with nature that way, becoming part of it. The wrong part. Who knows what’s become of them, or what they do, back up in there?”
“That’s disturbing. But why would they want to kill those backpackers?”
Even though the bar was empty, Fred leaned in still farther. “Mister, I can tell you that in just two words: tainted blood.”
7
Back in his car, Logan took a moment to jot down notes from his conversation with Fred the bartender, then he went back and looked over what he’d written earlier in the day. All the people he’d spoken to in Pike Hollow agreed on two things: one, a bear hadn’t mauled the backpackers, and two, the Blakeney clan was mixed up in it. Exactly how, they could not or would not say.
His final stop of the day, then, seemed an obvious one.
He started up the engine, then drove slowly down Main Street to its intersection with 3A. When he’d asked more precise directions to the Blakeney compound, Fred — after numerous warnings against an attempted visit and dire predictions about what might happen if he pursued one — finally relented. “Head west maybe a mile and you’ll see a turnoff on the left,” he’d said. “Ain’t hardly visible, no markings or signs or nothing. Only way to tell is it’s the only dirt track you’ll come across along that stretch of highway.”
He pulled back onto 3A, watching the odometer as he went. It was only quarter past four, but under the heavy, sky-obscuring canopy of the surrounding forest it seemed much later. At a little more than a mile past the Pike Hollow intersection, he came across what he assumed had to be the road into the Blakeney compound: little more than a narrow cut in the otherwise unbroken mass of foliage, a muddy, deeply rutted dirt path that twisted sharply away, vanishing from sight. As Fred the bartender had told him, it wasn’t hardly visible.
Nosing his Lotus into the turnoff, he began making his bone-jarring way down the lane. It was so narrow that branches brushed and scraped against both sides of the small vehicle. After creeping ahead about a quarter of a mile, he stopped: he’d bottomed out the suspension twice already in the deep ruts and didn’t dare go any farther. There was no room to turn around, and no room to pass an oncoming vehicle: he’d simply have to leave the car where it was.
He tried opening the driver’s door, but the living wall of undergrowth that hemmed in the car made it physically impossible. In the end, he was forced to put the top halfway down and crawl out over the windscreen and hood. He paused a moment in the lane to gather his wits and reconnoiter, allowing his preternaturally heightened senses free rein.
In this path that was little more than a man-made tube bored through the woods, it was even more humid than it had been on the road. The heavy fir branches around and above sweated a cold dew, and chill vapors wafted up from the ground. He glanced back at the roadster, plugging the dirt road like a cork plugged the neck of a bottle. Once more Logan felt, even more strongly, the sense of being an intruder here — for two reasons now rather than just one.
As he began making his way down the path, following its capricious twistings through ever-denser forest, he became aware of something else. All day — as he’d made the drive to Pike Hollow, as he’d toured the town — he had heard birdsong. But here, all was quiet. He had the strong impression that the woods were listening. It was all he could do not to tiptoe forward.
A final bend in the path, and it suddenly widened before him into a small clearing, the ends of the branches and brush on both sides hacked sharply off and gathered into rude, decaying piles. A blade of a machete with an ancient, hand-carved handle was buried deep in the trunk of a nearby red maple. But it was not this that caught Logan’s attention, or what made him stop abruptly in something close to disbelief.
Directly ahead, the rutted path ended in a walclass="underline" a wall at least eight feet high, constructed of innumerable twigs of similar size and length, arranged vertically, pressed tightly together and lashed with brown, rusting baling wire. There was no obvious break in the wall to indicate where it might open — if indeed it did open. The twigs had been fitted together with fantastic, obsessive precision, like some kind of rustic, diabolical jigsaw puzzle. While individually the twigs were relatively thin, there were so many of them, and they appeared to extend to such a depth — at least a foot or more — that the wall seemed impenetrable. It was clearly very old, and something about it — the texture of the twigs, or the fantastically, compulsively complex architecture by which they had been joined — unnerved Logan. His senses told him there was an otherness here; something that was not right. Fred the bartender had spoken about how the clan communed with nature, but what Logan felt very strongly — almost like a warning cry in his head — was something deeply unnatural.
He walked along the disquieting, makeshift wall, following it first to the left, then turning and following it to the right, to the points where it vanished into the forest. The trees and undergrowth were so thick at both points that it was impossible to follow its circumference past the opening offered by the clearing, but it seemed obvious the wall encircled a large area, at least a few acres and perhaps more.